The ability to keep delivering what matters when disruption arrives.
Operational resilience is an organisation’s ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and recover from disruption while it carries on delivering its critical services. It looks at the whole organisation, not only at one plan or one system.
Customers expect services to be available at all hours, and downtime is costly. Cyber threats, pandemics and natural disasters can interrupt them, regulators are paying closer attention, and most organisations depend on third parties they do not control. Resilience is how an organisation stays ready for all of that.
Business continuity keeps critical activities running through a disruption, and IT disaster recovery restores technology. Operational risk describes what can go wrong. Operational resilience builds on all three. It is broader, spanning people, processes, technology, facilities and the supply chain, and it focuses on the critical services an organisation provides. The work sits comfortably alongside ISO 22301 and the BCI Good Practice Guidelines (GPG 7.0).
The way risks are identified, owned, measured and reported.
The platforms and data that critical services depend on.
The skills, roles and procedures that keep services running.
The buildings, utilities and equipment behind each service.
The suppliers and partners the organisation relies on.
Understand what could disrupt critical services and get ready for it.
Reduce the chance of disruption and soften its effect.
Act quickly through an event and restore services.
Review what happened and improve before the next event.
Decide which services matter most, and how much disruption each can tolerate.
Trace the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers behind each one.
Find the weak points and the threats that could exploit them.
Make clear who owns resilience and who decides.
Exercise the arrangements with realistic scenarios.
Feed what you learn back into the plans.
Keep arrangements in line with the rules that apply to the organisation.
Scenario testing is how a strategy is proven. ADOX designs business continuity exercises and incident response and crisis management simulations for this. For ADOX’s own approach and the regulatory context, see the Operational Resilience page.
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Further reading: IBM Think